The Tree Where Man Was Born (Penguin Classics)
Language: English
Pages: 304
ISBN: 0143106244
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
A timeless and majestic portrait of Africa by renowned writer Peter Matthiessen (1927-2014), author of the National Book Award-winning The Snow Leopard and the new novel In Paradise
A finalist for the National Book Award when it was released in 1972, this vivid portrait of East Africa remains as fresh and revelatory now as on the day it was first published. Peter Matthiessen exquisitely combines nature and travel writing to portray the sights, scenes, and people he observed firsthand in several trips over the course of a dozen years. From the daily lives of wild herdsmen and the drama of predator kills to the field biologists investigating wild creatures and the anthropologists seeking humanity's origins in the rift valley, The Tree Where Man Was Born is a classic of journalistic observation. This Penguin Classics edition features an introduction by groundbreaking British primatologist Jane Goodall.
For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
Meinertzhagen, Col. Richard. Kenya Diary: 1902-1906. London, 1957. Middleton, John, and E. H. Winter, eds. Witchcraft and Sorcery in East Africa. Praeger, 1963. Murdock, G. P. Africa: Its Peoples and Their Culture History. McGraw-Hill, 1959. Neumann, Arthur. Elephant Hunting in East Equatorial Africa. London, 1898. Oliver, R., and J. D. Fage. A Short History of Africa. Penguin, 1962. Oliver, R., and G. Matthew. History of East Africa, vol. 1, Oxford, 1963. Parrinder, Geoffrey. African
appears, were the “Azanians” found along the coast of “Zinj”—tall bearded men, “red” in color, a piratical tribe of fishers who traded tortoise shell, soft ivory, and aromatic gums for iron blades and beads and cloth. Perhaps by this time the Azanians had mixed with those early Indonesians who brought the outrigger canoe and the marimba to the Indian Ocean coast and were to colonize Madagascar. Then, in the first centuries of the Christian era, waves of black peoples appeared out of the interior,
point of the game, like the point of pastoral life, is to acquire more stock than one’s opponent.20 The bao rock may have lain beside a vanished stream, but more likely it lay by the old shore of the lake, which was markedly higher even in the time of Count Teleki. The gaming rock, perhaps thousands of years old, passed the time of those dim figures whose passage here is marked by the silent cairns. On the old shore there is no sign of life, no bird, only gray shell and dusty rock and small
steal cattle, much less spear their fellow Africans. In an effort to damp their warlike nature, the buffalo-hide shields, black, white, and red, have been taken away from them, although spears may be carried as a defense against wild animals, and are still used occasionally on people; a white man was killed only a few years ago in the region of Narok. The Maasai have been compared6 to predators such as wild hunting dogs that seem strangely delicate in their adjustments to their environment, and
feel a warm flood of relief, as if I had been away all my life and had come home again—I want to embrace them all. And so both groups stand face to face, admiring each other in the sunlight, and then hands are taken all around, each man being greeted separately by all the rest. They are happy we are to visit them and delighted to pile the zebra meat into the Land Rover, for the day is hot and dry and from here to where these Hadza live, behind the Sipunga Hills, is perhaps six miles of stony